Rise and Fall
by Proud to be Plug
Summary: Everyone knows how she rose, but this is the story of how, and why, she fell. One-shot. Written for SydneyLouWho.


**Author's Note: This fic was written for SydneyLouWho, as part of the Easter fic exchange on my forum.**

**Thanks to Mission to Marzipan for being kind enough to read over this before I published it. **

**Now, Syd, I hope you enjoy it. **

**Prompts: **  
**-life and love are both fragile things**  
**-skyscrapers**  
**-she's alive but not living; breathing on the outside, but dead on the inside**  
**-"What if I died tomorrow? Would you miss me? Would you even care?"**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson. All my fanfic writings are non-profit. Tis all for fun.**

* * *

Rise and Fall

_Every girl has three guys in her life: the one she loves, hates, and the one she can't live without._

_In the end, they're all the same guy._

_—Unknown _

* * *

She walks - no, she plods, for no walk could be so depressed - down the street, her eyes downcast, her shoulders hunched against the chilly air. She really ought to be wearing a jacket, but she's long, long past caring about things as trivial as health.

No one gives her a second glance as she makes her way towards her final destination. After all, the streets around the Empire State Building are teeming with people who look just as miserable and battered as the red-haired girl.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket, but she disregards it, not even bothering to take it out of her pocket to check who's calling. She may be full of conflict, but she is quite sure of one thing: no-one can say anything to her that will make her feel any different. Her friends can talk to her, coax her, all they like, but it doesn't matter. The person that she was is long dead. All that remains is a body and a shell of a consciousness, and she has every intention of remedying that.

She pauses as she reaches the doors of the skyscraper that is, apparently, the focal point of Western Civilisation. A memory comes to her mind as she stands there, frozen, looking like one of her own neo-realistic sculptures. She thinks of a happier time, a time when she was alive in her spirit as well as her body…

* * *

"How are you feeling?" Apollo asked quietly, as he came into the room.

Rachel glanced up at him from where she lay upon the bed. "Better," she replied succinctly.

Apollo smiled slightly, which looked infuriatingly good, as he was in his best young-man form, not that Rachel noticed or anything. "Just better?" he said teasingly, pulling up a chair. "Come now, my dear Oracle. You and I are going to be working together for a long time, so we really ought to have a good working relationship."

Rachel shrugged. "I know, I'm just worn out, that's all."

Apollo sat forward in his chair, looking at her intently. He was silent for a couple of tense minutes, before finally saying, "You're wondering if you made the right choice."

"No!" Rachel replied quickly, straightening up and shaking her head. "It's not that, I only—"

She tailed off as she heard Apollo chuckle to himself. "Oh, Rachel, Rachel," he said lightly. "You don't have to deny it. I've been through so many— I mean, I've worked with so many Oracles. I know the pattern. You take the pledge, get all 'this is my destiny' about it, and then when you have a moment to think, you start having doubts."

Rachel opened her mouth to respond with a denial, but, seeing that Apollo knew the truth, she instead muttered, "Well. Yeah."

Apollo nodded. "Don't worry about it. In a few weeks' time, you'll be wondering why you didn't get this gig sooner."

Rachel sighed, somewhat more convinced. Though, she felt rather more won over by Apollo's charm rather than by his words

The sun god lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "And hey," he whispered, in a tone that made Rachel have ideas that had little to do with doubts or even common sense. "You've got me all to yourself!"

* * *

The memory fades away, and the girl shakes herself. She discovered, a few months ago, that one of the many side effects of being the Oracle of Delphi is that, when she is feeling particularly emotional, some of her important memories come back to her as visions.

Something else Apollo failed to mention when he was pretending to be her friend.

She breathes in and out, deeply, as she puts on the mask of composure that is, by now, as familiar to her as air or water. She slips into that mode of pretence, that polished and polite tone which disguises her shattered heart and murdered spirit. Finally, garbed fully in her public relations outfit, she plods into the lobby of the Empire State Building, doing her best to put an artificial spring in her step.

She reaches the security guard's desk, and stands silently. She waits for him to put down his book, upon the cover of which there is a picture of a man in a long dark coat, holding what appears to be a staff, and wearing an odd sort of hat. After a moment, the guard doesn't look up, and she clears her throat loudly. That startles the man, and makes him abruptly drop the book onto his desk.

He recovers quickly, and nods at her. "Hi. How can I help you?"

She sighs patiently, reaching into her jacket pocket, and withdrawing her Olympus ID, which she hands to the guard. He looks at it carefully, looks at the Oracle, looks at the card, frowns, shrugs, and nods again.

"There you go," he says, handing back the ID, paired now with the necessary key-card. "I assume you know the drill?"

She stiffens as she's asked this simple question. She braces herself, readying, in case the spirit of Delphi takes the random question as a cue to give her a vision. It doesn't, at least not right away, and she nods at the guard, before taking the cards and heading over to the elevators.

As she reaches out to press the button for the lift, however, she freezes as she gets hit with yet another vision of random carnage. The visions have increased in frequency over the years, to the point that any question has the potential to set one off. Apollo said it was because the spirit of the Oracle had been cooped up for so long. Apparently there was a sort of spiritual back-up of visions and the like, and she was experiencing the brunt of them.

The vision passes, unaccompanied, this time, by a prophecy. Her mind settles to a state of slightly milder turmoil, and she presses the button, to summon the lift.

As she waits, her thoughts drift back to Apollo, the only man she ever really loved. Of course, she knows now it was ridiculous, stupid; that the chances of her ever being Apollo's lover were slightly lower than those of Percy becoming an engineer.

Still, these rationalisations make no difference. From that first conversation with Apollo, when he pretended to be her friend (if not more), she was trapped. She _wanted_ him, and she thought he wanted her, too.

And he didn't exactly disillusion her: indeed, he led her on, playing with her like a cat with a ball of wool. She thought for a long time that he was just being coy, playing hard to get, to make the end result even more enjoyable.

It took a long time, but she finally professed her feelings to him in a flat-out declaration. When she did, he just looked at her, and said nothing.

The doors of the lift finally open, and she gets in. She puts the key-card in and nudges the button for the six-hundredth floor.

She stands at the back of the metal box, and gazes into the middle distance, remembering.

* * *

Rachel cried herself to sleep that night, the night of rejection. She dreamt no longer of her fantasy elopements with Apollo. Instead, she dreamt of a dark room, more a cave, really. The cave expanded in size around her, until she realised her dream had brought her to the most depressing place in the Underworld: the Fields of Asphodel.

The grey, barren fields extended out for miles in every direction, completely devoid of anything other than the equally grey spirits who filled them. Far in the distance, Rachel could see the fires of the Fields of Punishment, and, in the other direction, she could see the glow of Elysium.

Suddenly, to her great surprise, a voice called out her name. She looked around, but couldn't identify the speaker. She frowned, puzzled, for Nico had told her that no living thing can understand the dead. After a moment, Rachel called out in reply, "Who's there?"

"I am," said the voice, and the owner of that voice appeared right next to Rachel without so much as a whisper. The Oracle jumped backwards, with much alarm, before looking closely at the apparition.

The speaker was a young woman, of about Rachel's height and build. She had shoulder-length black hair and a pretty face, but her eyes were filled with such misery that they made her whole face look quite unimpressive, perhaps even ugly.

"Who are you? And how can I understand you?" Rachel asked nervously, coming a little closer.

"My name is— _was_ Melissa," the woman said quietly.

Rachel said nothing, waiting for Melissa to go on.

The ghost sighed, before saying, "I've appeared to you like this because I had the same fate, I travelled the same road, as you."

Rachel frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I, too, was the Oracle of Delphi, many years ago. I mean that I also fell in love with Apollo."

Rachel's breath hitched at the mention of the god. "And?" she said.

Melissa shook her head. "It took me many years to understand my error," she whispered. "But I know now what it was."

The ghost looked Rachel in the eye. "I fell in love with Apollo, the sun god, but I didn't realise that Apollo, the god of prophecy, was the one who knew me, that the sun god would never have anything to do with me. And the god of prophecy is a far colder, far darker entity than the sun god. It's in the nature of the prophecy god to play games, to play dice with humanity. "

Rachel shook her head, refusing to believe what Melissa was saying. "No. Maybe that's how he was with you, but I'm different, I _know_ I am."

The ghost looked away, shaking her own head sadly.

"And, how can I understand you, anyway?" Rachel asked frantically.

Melissa sighed again. "You have come here, and you can hear me, because, well, you're dying."

The Oracle stared at the spirit, aghast, before sputtering out, "N-no I'm not…"

"You may be breathing, and your heart may be pumping," the ghost said. "You _are_ dying, though. Your spirit is dying."

Melissa paused, staring across the fields, before continuing, "Life is a fragile thing. So is love. Should those two things become bound together, should your love become your life, their fragility is increased a hundredfold. Then, if your love finds no satisfaction, your love will decay, and so too will your life and your spirit."

The ghost's form began to fade. The Fields of Asphodel became darker and less defined, as Rachel's dream slowly broke up.

"Don't make my mistake, Rachel," Melissa said, her voice becoming more distant. "Don't die inside."

With that, the Oracle rose out of the dream, and woke with a start.

* * *

Rachel had always been strong-willed and rebellious, and it had often played to her advantage. This time, however, it made things a whole lot worse.

She didn't heed Melissa's words, and she kept on trying to win favour with Apollo, trying to make him love her. She was convinced beyond any doubt that _she_ was different, and _she_ would be the one to get what she desired so much.

She persevered, trying for months and months, but to no avail. Apollo remained perfectly neutral towards her after the first profession of her feelings, always talking to her like a business associate, and never saying a word about love.

It was strange, to say the least, and, over time, Melissa's warning gradually came true. Then, abruptly, one morning, Rachel's body woke up, but her spirit didn't. So, she decided, what's the point in going on like this? What's the point in living, if one is already dead?

That's not to say that she immediately decided to kill herself, of course. She went on, wandering around the world of the living, lost to herself, and everyone else. She lasted many months. It took one more heart-wrenching experience to make her give up the ghost completely.

* * *

The jolt of the lift stopping suddenly shakes her back into reality. The doors slide open with a hiss, and she steps out slowly, her eyes barely open.

She ignores the glorious vista of Olympus up ahead. Instead she focusses on the empty space below the stone steps that lead up to the divine city.

She jumps onto the first step of the way up to Olympus, and turns to one side, staring out across the void. She takes off her too-thin scarf, worn down like the rest of her, and tosses it over the edge experimentally. She watches it fall, watches as it spreads out in the breeze like a sort of ethereal bird. As it disappears from sight, she thinks of one more memory: her last conversation with Apollo.

* * *

It had been a short interchange. She went to Apollo's "public office", a euphemistic term for the radio station the god of music ran, and the place where he could be found every second Tuesday, without fail. The station was named, in a truly original fashion, "Sun Station", a piece of ridiculousness so glaringly obvious that even Rachel, in her state of spiritual rigor mortis, couldn't help but roll her eyes at it.

She knocked a soft double knock on Apollo's door. The god called out in an irritated tone.

"I told you, Maurice, we're playing the Elvis tracks all day, and that's final," he said. He started to continue but Rachel cut him off by calling through the door herself.

"It's Rachel," she said simply.

The silence that fell on the other side of the door was almost alarming. Rachel would have worried that perhaps Apollo had had a silent seizure, if he hadn't been a god. She stood there, staring at the scuffed, dark wood of the door for a minute or more, before finally hearing the sound of a deep sigh, and the quiet thuds of footsteps approaching the door. The room fell silent again as the doorknob moved ever so slightly, presumably as Apollo put his hand upon it. There was a split-second pause before the door opened, and the music god stepped out of the room.

He nodded at her, cordially enough, and began walking down the hall. This was the way Apollo liked to do business: walking and talking.

As he walked, Rachel noticed a change come over the god. When he'd come out of his office he'd seemed jovial and good-humoured. Now, though, his face had darkened, his gait had become more serious and measured, and his posture had straightened and stiffened. This was no random change of mood. All those alterations were Apollo's quiet, subtle transitions from his music god aspect to his prophecy god aspect.

Not that Rachel was concerned with that, of course. She'd seen such changes many time before, and by now she paid them little heed. No, she was wholly focussed on the reason she'd visited Apollo, and that reason was something that had occupied her thoughts for many a week.

"I…have been thinking," she began, glancing quickly at Apollo to try to gauge his mood, but his face was calm and neutral, as ever.

She cleared her throat, deciding whether or not to go into detail about what she'd been thinking about. Apollo interrupted her consideration, however, saying, "Yes?"

She started, and, thrown off by the god's interjection, blurted out, "I don't want to be the Oracle anymore."

Apollo stopped abruptly. Rachel cringed as she realised how ridiculously childish she sounded.

"Why?" said Apollo, starting to walk again, this time at a brisker pace.

Rachel had been prepared for this question, and she immediately reeled off her pre-planned answer. "Because the visions are too much," she said. "Because I don't want to be sending demigods to their deaths anymore. And because," she hesitated over the last reason, old feelings making her pause, but she plowed on, "because I don't want to have anything to do with you, anymore."

To her surprise, the god didn't miss a step as she said that. Instead, he just shook his head, and said, "I can't just take the spirit of the Oracle out of you. It can only be removed in certain conditions, such as death, so."

He shrugged, almost carelessly.

And, really, that was what made Rachel snap.

She turned around and punched Apollo, rather hard, in the shoulder. He stumbled back a step, looking at her with a touch of surprise.

"You— you _bastard_," she screamed. "You just don't care, do you? You don't give a flying fuck."

He started to speak, trying to say something in a conciliatory tone, but she cut him off.

"Say what you like," she raged. "I don't care. You used me, toyed with me, had your laughs, and now you don't care for me in any way. I'm just a prop to you, aren't I? Just a pawn!"

Apollo broke in. "Rachel, you have to understand," he said. "There are protocols. There are rules and rituals for all these things, and I have to follow them, like all the gods."

Rachel snorted. "And I'm just a silly mortal who got caught up in it all, right?" She shook her head, and said, "What if I died tomorrow? Would you care? Of course not. You don't care about me, you never did. And _that_, my dear Apollo, is why our relationship. Is. _Over_."

And with that she stormed away, careful to wait till she'd turned the corner before letting the tears flow freely.

* * *

She shudders as she comes out of the memory. She steps as close to the edge of the stone as she can, feeling a wild tornado of emotions whirling through her.

She takes a final look at the city of the gods. She thinks of all she has received, all she has given, and all she has left. She does the math, subtracts that which she's been given from that which she's received, and comes up with a big fat negative integer. And, resolved of one thing at last, she looks into the void and takes one more step. The final step, in fact.

And as Rachel Elizabeth Dare falls, as her life flashes before her eyes, as she lets go of the final, thought-thin thread that binds her to life, she is, in the strangest way possible, happy.

For at long, _long_ last, her pain is over.


End file.
